Drugs are costly to develop and then Big Pharma are large corporations who want to make money. If they can market these drugs to larger populations (say the smart-drug set as well as patients with degenerative diseases) the costs may come down substantially, and they may be more likely to develop more of these drugs.

I think you just need to add a modern stack to your resume and put out an example project on github, you'll be ready to find work. The stacks that people are hiring for right now:

Python -- tornado -- mysql / nosql (mongo or redis experience)

Ruby -- Rails -- mysql / nosql

Haskell/Erlang/Functional Insanity -- I have no idea how these people deal with data

Javascript/ Nodejs -- mongo probably

IOS Development

A solid web application based on bootstrap.js in any of the first four frameworks will get you an interview. A sample application for IOS should as well, at probably any one of your local agencies / design firms / app shops.

If I were in your shoes, I'd skip the big enterprise languages, like Java / C# -- if you like Perl, you're going to hate working in those languages, and much of the work in those languages sucks, to be honest.

My money-shot idea: learn kdb+ and q and go pull in $250k a year working for a hedge fund / investment bank. Also, it's fun and brain-bending.

Yes, you need a strong grounding in Math to ensure you understand all of the underlying concepts, even if you don't need to implement them yourself. Like learning the CLI before falling back to the user-friendly GUI. Eventually you want to do something the GUI can't, and you're back at the command line.

Besides, most programmers son't spend their whole life as professional programmers. In fact, some who start out in that direction end up elsewhere. Why limit your choices later in life by short-cutting now? If nothing else, the rigor provided by math will suit you well whereever you go. And while you're at it, please take a statistics class. About 85% of americans couldn't tell you what 85% actually means.

Does anyone have a less malicious, less illegal, less profit-driven way to do this at a level that doesn't violate civil liberties?

I have kids who are well-internet-educated. I trust them. But I also want to be able to see what's trying to leave my network. I'm a hardcore security guy, but I have better things to do than spend my free time setting up netflow on my Tomato-USB router. I use OpenDNS as a first line of defense (kids are still young enough to be more likely to find porn by accident rather than on purpose, but I know that won't last.) and I have their internet connections cut off at night so they'll go the hell to bed.

I don't want to spy on my kids conversations, but I reserve the right (and make this abundantly clear to them) to see where they're going and what they're doing. As they get older that will fade a little, especially if we can maintain the level of trust we have today. I want non-intrusive but effective ways to keep tabs on goings on without being a dick.

Bitcoin is fundamentally backed by public key cryptography and computational power. That proof-of-computation done is real and valuable, for instance, you can currently 'safely' transact thousands of dollars in a single bitcoin block without worrying about forks or cheating. Two years ago, you could only transact 10 or 20 dollars without worrying about forks or cheating. The difference is that it is FAR more expensive to cheat the bitcoin network now, coming on to non-feasible.

This is a real increase in value, and it's because of the computational resources thrown into the system.

But if you have all these other interests, one does wonder why you didn't pursue them at school too. I'm not denying the value of knowledge gained in a psych program, but knowing that it's one of the worst degrees for post-degree employment and underemployment? I coupled my English Lit degree with one in Math, and lots of physics, chem, comp sci and engineering.

If you continue your education (either with training or a degree program) in whatever field you pursue, you'll end up a better, more well-rounded employee for having the psych degree, but as you can tell it's a bit up hill to start.

2 bits, written poorly and so problematic on that basis, but with the right idea at their heart:

1) To protect students from having to provide their personal login info for social networks to coaches or administrators. This is in response to NC State (or is it UNC?) requiring exactly that, after the NCAA faulted them for NOT doing it after some NCAA student-booster violation of some sort. Nothing illegal mind you, but they broke NCAA rules.

2) To protect employees (or prospective ones) from having to turn over these credentials.

I say they're poorly written because they are too specific, and somewhat inaccurate, in their technical prohibitions. The university system testified that they were problematic because they would potentially prohibit US from requiring students use antivirus programs or other security measures when on our networks. We hope they're fixing that bit.

I'm pretty sure that it says that exercise ramps up your metabolism, and so does caffeine, but exercise is less likely to kill you in the process. That this happens isn't even remotely surprising, nor a new development. What seems new is that it is taking place at such a low level in the metabolic process (i.e. at the genetic level.) I think.

So as a consumer already paying for cable (because I have an outlet to connect to, unless I've gone to heroic effort to run my own in from the street,) I choose to pay money to one guy's company to get internet access for free instead of paying an incremental increase in service fee for internet access that's "legitimate?" Seems like a fair amount of work and money to "steal" something.

I'm all for sticking it to the man, especially cable companies, but this seems to make not a whole lot of sense.

Google has deep pockets, and has been known to do good things for their own sake (no, I don't buy the whole "don't be evil" thing, but there's a decent track record there) Setup or fund existing mesh networking systems to allow a grassroots network (with a new name) that is decentralized completely. I know research is going on in this area for a variety of reasons, put more brains and money on it and make it happen. "Work toward saying to the UN: You can have the Internet, we're done with it now."

I understand the desire to eject and focus on the new work, and certainly that there may have been more than one reason to want to make your move in the first place. I work at a university as well, and understand the challenges and difficulties in moving up inside them.

That said, recognize that if you've done what many sysadmins do and hacked together a bunch of tools to make everything hum without excellent documentation (I certainly have) then you owe your replacement (if not your former bosses) some assistance. You are part of institutional memory and even if you documented your solutions well, you likely didn't document the reasons behind them, or the politics that surrounded them. The new guy/gal will need that context.

Give your one-day hand-over, and in it, set a very clear protocol with boundaries that everyone can agree on (including your new bosses) for providing assistance to the new sysadmin. Make it clear that off-hours is out of bounds, or create a process that avoids you hiking across campus on no notice. Questions will arise over the next several years, though they should taper more or less exponentially. Expect it and be prepared. The value to you of not being a dick about it will be enormous, especially if you plan to stay there for a substantial period of your career (and as a fellow uni employee, why would you not?) will be substantial.

Energy use per cm^3 has risen dramatically over the last 20 years. By your stated measures it should be dropping. Datacenters no longer have space budgets, they have power budgets, waste heat is one THE big problems with computers and datacenters right now.